How were LGBT people transformed from dangerous perverts who threatened family and state to military heroes and respectable parents? How did this happen during a time when the United States grew more politically conservative in the wake of the Reagan Revolution? In recent years these topics have been addressed in a variety of areas within political science, including American Political Development (APD; see, for example, Stephen Engel, Fragmented Citizens: The Changing Landscape of Gay and Lesbian Lives, 2016), public opinion (see, for example, Jeremiah Garretson, The Path to Gay Rights: How Activism and Coming out Changed Public Opinion, 2018), law and courts (see, for example, Jason Pierceson, Same-Sex Marriage in the United States: The Road to the Supreme Court, 2015), and comparative politics (see, for example, Miriam Smith, Political Institutions and Lesbian and Gay Rights in the United States and Canada, 2008; for examples drawn from other areas in political science, see Brettschneider, Burgess, and Keating, LGBTQ Politics: A Critical Reader, 2017).
In Political Advocacy and Its Interested Citizens: Neoliberalism, Postpluralism, and LGBT Organizations, Matthew Dean Hindman makes an excellent addition to this collection, exploring the role that organizations and interest groups have played in the development of LGBT rights and liberties in APD. For Hindman, the success of the LGBT movement is best understood as a product of a broader advocacy explosion in the neoliberal period that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s and is continuing through the present day. He argues that mobilization in this political time has incentivized efficient and economical political strategies that create “interested” citizens, whose participation in politics is largely limited to contributing money and deferring the direction of the movement to (largely white gay cisgender) experts who man the mainstream LGBT organizations from the top down.
On the basis of a careful qualitative, interpretive study of various movement publications, organizational newsletters, and other related data drawn from several key LGBT archives, Hindman argues that neoliberal principles shaped most LGBT organizations. Three of the four core chapters of the book detail how neoliberal principles shaped the movement as LGBT began to emerge as an identifiable interest group and as burgeoning organizations schooled members to present themselves in an orderly fashion that would not ruffle mainstream sensibilities. For example, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) became a largely single-issue group during this period, as evidenced by its endorsement of a Republican pro-life candidate for Senate in 1998. Not everyone fell in line, as a very visible media controversy ensued and many progressive members left the organization for good. Nonetheless, well-funded interest groups like the HRC prospered during this period and have been credited with producing a variety of political successes during a markedly conservative political time. There was much less ruckus in 2016 when the HRC endorsed sitting Republican senator Mark Kirk over Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), perhaps indicating neoliberalism’s success in creating “interested” citizens who continue to write checks and accept leadership decisions more or less passively. In neoliberal terms, these are the deliverables of these organizations. But at what cost? The interested citizen consumes and invests in advocacy, rather than participating in politics more directly or offering a more systemic critique of mainstream (neoliberal) politics.
By contrast, a handful of more radical organizations such as the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP) self-consciously disdained neoliberal principles during this same period, rejecting hierarchical organizing and fundraising tactics in favor of grassroots-guided, direct-action–based movements that fostered intersectional coalition building. Hindman takes up this development in his last core chapter, contrasting the direct political action of ACT-UP with the service orientation of Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC). Both were driven by desperation, as mainstream politicians largely refused to even discuss AIDS, let alone devote resources to address the crisis. As more and more members of the gay community fell ill and died, GMHC undertook the important work of organizing help for those who were afflicted, leaving political advocacy on the backburner.
As Hindman documents, ACT-UP defiantly rejected the terms of neoliberalism, organizing from the ground up; creating angry protests that disrupted business as usual on Wall Street, at the National Institutes of Health, Bellevue Hospital, and the White House; and exposing drug company profiteering, scientific bias, exclusion from public services, and government neglect. Rather than passively accepting the authority of these well-established institutions, ACT-UP members became experts in their own right, marshaling scientific evidence that supported the release of new drugs to fight the outbreak. Their grassroots-level organizational structure spawned a systemic critique as they realized that the problem driving the AIDS crisis was not only disdain for LGBT people but also a deeply flawed health care delivery system that structurally disadvantaged the poor, women, and people of color. Rather than disciplining their political and sexual behavior to present a palatable image to the masses, participants encouraged cheeky civil disobedience. This kind of queer sensibility kept the movement energized and garnered a great deal of media attention that exposed the many hypocrisies of the political Right. For example, the group constructed a giant condom over the home of Sen. Jessie Helms (R-NC) who had been blocking funds in Congress on moral grounds and staged die-ins at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and the White House, as well as kiss-ins at Major League baseball games.
ACT-UP had many successes, prompting the FDA’s release of quicker testing protocols and key drugs to fight the virus. Yet the heyday of ACT-UP lasted only about five years for a variety of reasons, including member mortality and intragroup conflict about strategic direction, particularly across race, gender, and class lines. Although the work of transformational groups like ACT-UP revealed “tension points,” it also led to “a more robust and dynamic politics than economized, neoliberalized ones” (p. 182). Hindman concludes that such groups typically produce political change only for a short period of time. He further concludes that neoliberal groups such as the HRC and radical groups such as ACT-UP both affected “queer imaginaries” during this time. Indeed, there is no question that both significantly altered the way that LGBT issues are understood in mainstream politics and that both, in their own ways, challenged the conventional boundaries of mainstream politics. Groups like the HRC opted to conform to neoliberal norms, cultivating “different expressions of civil engagement” that would work inside “dominant or hegemonic understandings of social identities, political interests and legal procedures for achieving recognition” (p. 180). Disdaining neoliberal politics allowed groups like ACT-UP to launch systemic critiques of status quo politics, opening up “inventive, oppositional, or iconoclastic political agendas and expansive political horizons” (p. 181). Others have suggested that a dynamic tension between mainstream groups and radical movements has been a mainspring of significant political change in the United States, transforming what we expect and demand from mainstream politics (see, for example, Susan Burgess and Kate Leeman, Radical Politics in the United States, 2017). For his part, Hindman closes by pondering how Donald J. Trump was elected president just one year after the US Supreme Court recognized marriage equality and only a few short years after Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter challenged mainstream business and policing as usual—an excellent place for work to continue as this decidedly neoliberal political time continues to unfold or perhaps unravel in the years to come.
